Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday February 06, 2014 @05:30PM
from the building-with-the-enemy dept.

snydeq writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some advice for Apple CEO Tim Cook: consider offering a phone based on the rival Google Android platform. Speaking at the Apps World conference in San Francisco, Wozniak made the suggestion of an Apple Android device when responding to a question about the fate of the faltering BlackBerry platform, saying that BlackBerry should have built an Android phone, and that Apple could do so, too. 'BlackBerry's very sad for me,' Wozniak lamented. 'I think it's probably too late now' for an Android-based BlackBerry phone. Apple, Woz said, has had some lucky victories in the marketplace in the past decade, and BlackBerry's demise may provide a cautionary tale: 'There's nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.'"

There's nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.

Of course there is. Apple isn't allowed to distribute copies of Android to the public except under license from Linus Torvalds, Google, and other contributors to Android. If Apple accepts the license of Android (mostly Apache v2 and GPLv2), it has to give the public an implicit or explicit license to patents that Apple holds that Android allegedly infringes. So unless Apple wants to end up dropping lawsuits against Samsung, it has to refrain from making an iDroid.

They (BMW) already have a lower-end model, it's called the Mini Cooper.

And Mercedes has Smart, and even had Smart in North America for a time.

And the analogy falls apart when one considers that Apple isn't really a premium brand anyway. Unfortunately the premium brands are essentially gone now. SGI, Sun, hell, even HP and IBM had their high, high end workstations. Apple doesn't make high-end, they make commodity. They make some things that are better than others, but for every Cadillac they have plenty of Buicks and Chevrolets.

On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.

Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.

If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this [slashdot.org] in a new tab. After seeing that, click here [slashdot.org] to return to classic Slashdot.

We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott [slashdot.org]

Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss BetaCommentors - only discuss the Beta - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories

Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.